A HIGH WIND IN VENEZIA

Everyone suspected it but no one said anything.

Venice is an ageing trickster. For fifteen centuries she has seen the ships come and go, the traders and the merchants. She has used them as the winds have used her. She is an old hand at winds and wanderers. Fickle, the coquette, the off-the-shoulder singer with the rose in her hair in all the quayside bars in all the ports of the Adriatic, she has seen it all before. She watches, she sways to the music and the water and she calculates. On a still day she is the young courtesan folding you in her furs and her perfumed silks. On a day which holds the threat of a storm she is the ancient whore who beckons with her knotted finger and you know she will cut you with her cruel winds, cold from the grey sea.

It was the twenty fourth of September, the second of the Ember days, and everyone suspected it but no one said anything. You knew because even as long before as the previous Tuesday there was a tiny tornado in the campo. A column of gritty dust, a metre tall, no more, had coiled its way through the humid air from the fountain to the corner by the bridge where it folded on itself and died. And that was all.

The second of the Ember days had begun almost fresh with a slight suggestion of chill but by mid morning the old humidity had returned. By late morning the eastern sky which had become the colour of an illness, turned from its greenish yellow to grey and then to black like a great and painful bruise. And now the gulls which are thrown against it are wheeling like shining petals from a garden of white roses. Out on the lagoon, the water, which has been still and thick as soup for days, now looks almost frivolous. A light wooden crate which might once have held lettuces slides noisily across the campo. It holds its stability like a hovercraft until it becomes stuck by the fountain and stops. Modern plastic boats bounce at their moorings, nervous and jumpy as racehorses. The traditional wooden ones, which they have largely replaced, remain unperturbed as if they have seen it all before, seen before the knotted finger and the bruised sky.

It is going to rain.

When it comes it comes silently. The drops are heavy, few and far apart. They slap into the dust and are absorbed by it so that the stones are not wet, just a darker colour. But this silence is no more than the false respite in the horror film, the ticking clock before the knife, and suddenly with a sort of crash the wind arrives. The high wind. Shutters rattle and slam and test their hinges. Plastic and paper are airborne, cats run everywhere, a tower of wooden crates is strewn across the campo and into the canal, even a half-consumed pile of bricks is felled. This all within the space of ten or fifteen seconds. Scaffolding shudders, creaks, flexes and rattles and cement render is torn away from walls like crusty scabs from old wounds.

The rain increases.

Now there seems no space between the drops so that there is more water than air. It swirls and writhes, a confused slave of the high wind which is blowing now in all directions and more. Mostly now you cannot see but there are instances where there are holes in the cloud of rain, the blanket of rain and you can see for a second or two a great grey curtain of water falling from roofs and overwhelmed gutters to the flood on the stones below. There is no one here but there should be for you are looking for someone. And she is looking for the old people who have tried to get, against advice, from the shop to their flat, and you know that even their unique stubbornness would not offer them the privilege of survival in this. They  wouldn't stand a chance.

The water in the wide canal, Rio di Santa Giustina, is churning and driving towards the city like a river in spate. It reminds you of one of those newsreel clips of a flood disaster that always carry the caption 'amateur video'. You expect to see cars floating with their wheels up, buoyant like dead animals, trees and branches and someone clinging pointlessly to some railings. But here there are no cars. There is, however, all the water of the great lagoon and it is being forced into this canal by the wind and as it tumbles past with great breaking waves you wonder stupidly, as if it mattered, how fast is it moving. But it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter because suddenly she is there, running across the bridge, bouncing off its wall like a roller skater out of control. She cannot hear your shout although she is only metres away from you and you run to her. She has the appearance of a cat pulled from a well or a troubled mermaid with seaweed in her hair. She has not found them. In the leeward side of the bridge you shout your sentences at each other for normal talking would be useless and perhaps it is this shouting which causes a door to be opened behind you and there is the mother, tiny and afraid. The daughter berates her with a short and angry lecture which probably is unheard and you fight your way home.

On the way the wind eases and the rain lessens. Venice, the ageing trickster with the knotted fingers, has exhausted herself and tomorrow you know she will once more become the off-the-shoulder singer with the rose in her hair. The singer, the proud singer, the singer with all the secrets and all the schemes and who will never ask for your forgiveness. Now you can see better and every calle, every campo is strewn with masonry, flower pots, thousands of red geranium petals and tangles of broken umbrellas, spiky and membranous and looking like a massacre of bats.

The following morning there is a unique shining light, all the colours are bright and the air so clean you think you could see for ever. On the stones there are heavy broken branches even where there are no trees growing. The fibres of their split limbs like painful muscles golden and torn. From yesterday's bridge whose steps are camouflaged by debris you can look along the now clean water of Rio di Santa Giustina across the lagoon and the cupressus trees of the cemetery to the shining snowy mountains that seem so close, so peaceful, so wise. And somewhere in that thin air so fresh it is hardly there you swear you hear a siren's mocking love song from some bar on some distant Adriatic shore.